Pam Johnson, of Dallas, Texas was the mastermind behind this non-occasion. This is only fitting since she’s the founder of the Secret Society of Happy People, a group I greatly admire since very few organizations live up to their name as well as theirs does.

     Pam decided that August 8th should be National Admit You’re Happy Day, so she sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to make official proclamations to that effect. Fifteen went along with the idea. Seventeen said thanks, but no thanks. One, New York’s Governor Pataki, hedged his bet by saying he’d wait and see what everyone else did. The other seventeen letters came back marked "Moved, Left No Forwarding Address. Besides, Are You Serious?" Just kidding. Actually they got them, they just couldn’t stop laughing long enough to reply.

     I’m not sure if this is a real, honest to goodness, official day, but it was sponsored by the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance and it sounds like they ought to know. It wasn’t clear from the flier who or what would be forgiven, so I can only assume that everyone would be forgiven for everything. This is a good thing, since holding a grudge is bad for your blood pressure, slows digestion, and generally makes people think of you as a big fat poophead.

     So for medical reasons, if no others, I think it’s good that we have a day when we can forgive each other. This gives me the chance to finally forgive the kids down the block who years ago held me down while Bobby Bagley put a worm on my forehead. It would be the perfect opportunity for me to forgive my parents for not giving me half the money they saved when I didn’t go to college. And I could go ahead and forgive that old lady who rammed my supermarket cart the other day so she could cut in front of me at the checkout line. Well, as long as she forgives me for tripping her on her way out.

     At the risk of being called a cynic, I’m not sure visualization is really enough. We may need tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes. In Spain they’ve devised a unique way of avoiding war: they take their aggressions out by throwing tomatoes at each other. This year more than 30,000 people showed up in Bunol, Spain at the end of August for a festival where they threw 140 tons of tomatoes at each other. To put this in perspective, that was 9.3 lbs. per person (or 72 kilometers per hour metric). They’ve been doing this for years, and it’s been officially sponsored by the city since 1979. The glory of it is, Spain hasn’t been in a war since! And even better, they didn’t have to slap a single bumper sticker on their car to accomplish it.